Yes, a mistake. Which just happened to wipe out the exact parts of the Constitution that the President has been ignoring.
You know what? I'm going long con on this. I think some badass Librarian deleted those sections so that we would have to acknowledge publicly that those rights are indeed guaranteed in the Constitution.
Very conveniently selected "error" I'd say.
"The dog ate the cookies!" said the toddler caught with chocolate on his face and his arm in the jar.
Release the Epstein files.
If we ever get out of Trump's bullshit. We need a total rework of the power for the executive branch. It's been run on "good faith" for too long.
Yup. We can't rely on "Well, OK, there's no law about this, it's just how we've always done things."
Interestingly, in my high school course about legal systems, "tradition" was considered like a very low level law. Basically if "this is how we've always done things" and there's no explicit law, executive order or anything... it's legal
People should read up on the leadership conflict currently going on at the Library of Congress.
On May 8, 2025, two days after Hayden had given testimony to the Senate Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on House Administration,[80][81] via email and without any explanation, she was abruptly fired by President Trump ... No replacement of Hayden has been nominated. Principal Deputy Librarian Robert Newlen,[86] who would have served as interim librarian was fired and Trump named Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as acting librarian of Congress and later fired the deputy librarian and copyright office director (Perlmutter and Newlen), appointing senior DOJ officials Brian Nieves and Paul Perkins as respectively, for the interim. This has been interpreted as an attack on the separation of powers.[87] Perlmutter has sued to dispute the legality of the dismissal,[88] as the Register is appointed by, and responsible to, the Librarian of Congress.
So currently there are two conflicting acting directors of LOC. One, who is a lawyer, appointed by Trump, whom noone at LOC accepts, and one librarian, who does the actual day to day administration.
It is curious that the article doesn't mention who is speaking for the LOC, they are just twitter messages by the LOC account. I bet that while the Trump sycophant has no power over any of the librarians in LOC, he is in control of the LOC twitter account and the website, with some external techbros doing his bidding, and that is all he has to play with, yet unsurprisingly enough still managed to turn everything into shit just with those slivers of control.
The actual staff of the LOC are just doing their library thing (their youtube channel has been very active lately with some knowledgeable and interesting stuff), while this piece of shit is busy doing his Trump shit.
Classic error ID10T. Happens all the time when there's a short between the keyboard and chair.
It’s like seeing a toddler with chocolate on their face denying that they just ate chocolate.
We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon
Lol, this is a static site. A 5 minute change. Even if they have a process to run all changes through review and testing before deployment (which they don't or else this kind of "coding error" wouldn't have happened), this is fixed same-day. They're lying.
review and testing
TBF, who would write a test to test whether or not parts of the fucking Constitution had been removed?
If it was run on like, GitHub Pages, you would do a rollback.
I have support for rollbacks in my site cause I have blue-green...... I never use it, but I do have it!
Awfully specific sections that didn't load.
2 removals and an edit, all 3 pertaining to things Trump's trying to bully his way into existence. Complete accident though.
Oh, they're still missing hours later? That's weird...
"We swear that our top developer, Chat GPT fixed the issue."
More likely Grok.
Was it praising Hitler or drawing nude pictures of Taylor Swift?
It was drawing nude pictures of Hitler.
Devil's advocate, but depending on how the page is laid out in the code, it could be that the entirety of Article 1 is a section, so if a mistake was made at some point in the section it would affect the rest of it.
Considering they fired all of the competent people, it's within the realm of possibility that it was a fuck up. Shit, they might have just copy and pasted whatever chatgpt spit out.
But if it was really a coding error, all they'd have to do is provide the merge request.
Fuck you and your devil’s advocate the results are what matter and the results are what we’re planned, get your head out of your fucking ass
"coder" (stupid person term for what I do) here: No, this wasn't an accident.
Hear me out. They may have some shitty convoluted markup, and they wanted to make a change to make it "more maintainable" or some shit.
But it was so poorly laid out with no separation of html and CSS they needed to copy and paste it but by bit, and the junior they paid to do it wasn't really paying attention and missed a chunk.
Possible.
Or, and I think more likely, someone used an AI agent to make some change and it deleted a whole lot of shit, nobody checked what changed and they "shipped lots of changes, they have the best changes"
I don't think it was an amendment, so that part of the Constitution probably hasn't changed in 200 years
This came up in the thread last night. Why would you dynamically load content that, practically, never changes?
It ACTUALLY never changes. Even if it's Amended, the Amendment is an addition, nothing gets removed.
See: Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3:
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
That’s what the s html element is for:
<s>strikethrough</s>
~~strikethrough~~
(not to be confused with /s for sarcasm)
So brown people can be detained and deported easier. Duh.
Off by one error I could believe if the articles are displayed through an array and not a purely plain text in a div. Off by two error I think not.
Off by 2 and a half. It makes no sense.
For those curious+lazy, the removed sections were "pertaining to Habeas Corpus and judicial review of unlawful detention".
And more, like the bit about no Ex Post Facto laws, emoluments, and titles.
and the entire US Navy
Whoopsie, what a mistake to make.
This is just like all those times he 'accidentally' ;-);-) raped all the little children and then refused to release the Epstein list.
Curious "coding error". The only "coding error" I can see here is that they already prepared the site for future changes they plan, and just executed them early.
They're just trying to make it harder to look up your rights. If they were actually trying to erase these sections there would be lawsuits or bills going through congress. Not saying that they aren't going to do that, just that this particular instance is more trying to withhold information.
This just gave me an idea, every website, blog, ect. should post a full text copy of the constitution. Hell I have a blog I don't post on that much, I might do this after work.
Turns out, all the Republican "constitutionalists" ever meant was that they wanted to be able to yell slurs and kill brown people with impunity. They just had to hide it behind noble-sounding language until the right Nazis were in power.
Are they trying to pull an Animal Farm on the constitution?
Literally.
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
It’s sad that they think editing some html will in some way further their agenda to ignore the actual document.
And it’s sad that they might be right.
While technically plausible, I bet the explanation is somewhere in the middle:
Some Trump loyalist with access to this website, perhaps inspired by internal discussions or news, deleted these sections from the databases.
…Or something like that. Other extremes (following an official order, or a massively coincidental technical accident) just feel too implausible to be true.
My working theory is in the middle between yours and what they said.
This is based on my viewing of the content in question yesterday, and my decades of experience as a software developer, including web page development.
You didn't have to compare it to the original, it just looked wrong as it was. It looked to me like all of the content starting from Article I Section 8 until the end of Article I was all wrong. Like rendered weird and/or removed. All of a sudden, it was just a bunch of paragraphs that seemed out of place. No headings, for example.
I suspect that some MAGA was trying to change something, rather than delete all of the stuff that was deleted. Because A LOT was deleted. It can't be a coincidence that these sections are relevant to ongoing criticisms of Trump, but not all of the deleted parts were relevant. Somebody either tried to add/edit an annotation, or they tried to edit the wording of the Constitution directly.
And I suspect that whatever method they use to store the constitution and annotations is extremely error prone. And so, let's say that the person edited in a quotation mark ("). If the software doesn't handle characters like that properly, something like that alone can cause problems like what I saw.
So, in that case, they could call it a "coding error" and pretend like they weren't lying. Both the software for the website and markup for the data can be called "code".
On top of that, government software is usually done by the lowest permitted bidder, so it's not surprising if it is basically done by an amateur who doesn't know how to escape characters. Finally, the incompetence of trying to edit something without reading the instructions that surely exist, and without checking the result for unintended consequences, is exactly the sort of incompetence that I expect from MAGA.
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News